The media's lab leak fiasco | Hacker News Reader

The media's lab leak fiasco

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There’s a question as to why that fake consensus emerged. But I think the more troubling question is: How did people let the original story of what Tom Cotton even said go so badly awry? Essentially Cotton said something that was then transformed into a fake claim of a Chinese bio-attack, then the fake claim was debunked, and then the debunking was applied to the real claim with little attention paid to ongoing disagreement among researchers.

I think this part of the text really sums up everything I hated about reading the news and social media in 2020. Each site seemed to be funneling you into a single source of truth and way of not only thinking, but FEELING about an event. I don't like being reminded of corporate sponsored social movements if I open facebook/google/amazon/twitter. I don't want my app reminding me to vote/get vaccinated(I did both btw) every time I open it without a way to dismiss and select 'I already did, stop reminding me.' I don't want reddit creating a central sub-page for discussing [Current Event] within the narrow bounds of what their moderators think is acceptable. I don't like non-dismissable context text on twitter and under youtube videos that are often off topic and triggered by bad speech detection that simply take you to a link dump of regular news articles. I don't like the idea that there's an oligopoly on "truth" and "credible sources." No amount of branding will convince me that "fact checkers" are any more objective and impartial than regular newspaper columnists; fact checkers are what editors are supposed to be. There's no academic rigor to fact checking, and the reality that so much casual skepticism on a variety of topics was suppressed and equivocated with being a flat-earther is sickening.

Each site seemed to be funneling you into a single source of truth and way of not only thinking, but FEELING about an event.

Which is a big problem. In the intelligence community, people are taught to distinguish between data items from different sources, which may indicate confirmation, and data items from the same source via different paths, which don't.

I think this is a good place for authorship attribution AI's. A plugin that will identify text that resembles known PR and propaganda and links to the original source.

Is this a real review or is this person writing their review from a script? Am I interacting with a real person or someone paid to sway the public opinion of something on a forum?

Edit: Maybe we could prevent more influence by Satya @ MS and the like. "In fact, this morning, I was reading a news article in Hacker News, which is a community where we have been working hard to make sure that Azure is growing in popularity and I was pleasantly surprised to see that we have made a lot of progress..." https://sg.finance.yahoo.com/news/microsoft-corp-msft-q1-201...

You reminded me of this piece by Glenn Greenwald: https://greenwald.substack.com/p/how-do-big-media-outlets-so...

> what was most notable about this episode is that it was not just CNN which reported this fraudulent story. An hour or so after the network shook the political world with its graphics-and-music-shaped bombshell, other news networks — including MSNBC and CBS News — claimed that they had obtained what they called “independent confirmation” that the story was true.

> All of this prompted the obvious question: how could MSNBC and CBS News have both purported to “independently confirm” a CNN bombshell that was completely false? The reason this matters is because the term “independently confirm” significantly bolsters the credibility of the initial report because it makes it appear that other credible-to-some news organizations have conducted their own investigation and found more evidence that proves it is true. That is the purpose of the exercise: to bolster the credibility of the story in the minds of the public.

> But what actually happens is as deceitful as it is obvious. When a news outlet such as NBC News claims to have “independently corroborated” a report from another corporate outlet, they often do not mean that they searched for and acquired corroborating evidence for it. What they mean is much more tawdry: they called, or were called by, the same anonymous sources that fed CNN the false story in the first place, and were fed the same false story.

> NBC News pretended they had obtained “independent confirmation” when all they had done was speak to the same sources that fed CNN.

>In the intelligence community

What do you mean by this? And I'm not being snarky, really.

>Which is a big problem.

Is it? What if the alternative is that people feel the wrong way about things?

If we're going to talk about the intelligence community, then the same criticism that gets used against the media needs to be brought up: the Iraq WMD.

> In the intelligence community, people are taught to distinguish between data items from different sources

Where on earth do you get this from?

In additional to the yellow cake fiasco, remember the pressure US and British intelligence came under find kompromat on UN security council members to bully them into voting for the Iraq invasion.

Complete and utter lap dogs.

> No amount of branding will convince me that "fact checkers" are any more objective and impartial than regular newspaper columnists; fact checkers are what editors are supposed to be. There's no academic rigor to fact checking

Matt Taibbi recently published an article about how the role and visibility of fact-checking has changed over recent years (the meat of this is in the second half of the article)

https://taibbi.substack.com/p/fact-checking-takes-another-be...

This was an interesting read, but I think there's something missed with fact-checkers. They seem to be caught in a strict binary of true and false when there's often a third possibility: we do not have the necessary information to either prove or disprove a claim/statement.

There are alternatives ( at least around the World ), that include a limited range of conclusions from "true", "imprecise", "out of context", "manipulated" to "false".

I agree but I think it has to do with credibility and authoritative sources that used to be credible within some reason no longer being so.

I remember watching one of those movies like Zeitgeist 15 years ago (but it was about physics) and being enthralled by it and eagerly shared everything I learned with a bunch of people for months.

I eventually learned like 80%+ of that movie was made up BS, purposefully made to look more credible than it actually was.

That ruined the entire thing for me. It wasn't ethical or right to pick and choose pieces from a dishonest source -- The whole thing was thrown out much like not credible witnesses in a court case.

Again, I totally agree with the consequences of this and that it's not a good thing but if you met someone who talked about the flat earth nonstop and then told you about global warming, would you listen with the same openness if they believed the earth was round?

It’s be fairly confused if a flat earther talked about GLOBAL warming.

On a serious note I’ve learned to not take anything as gospel. Facts aren’t binary, they sit on a spectrum and also in an ecosystem. Given the natural information compression that exists in thought and language it’s impossible to be too sure of anything. The one thing I’ve stopped however is being 100% sure of anything. Of course I will dismiss obvious BS from sociopaths but on the other end of the spectrum I also tread more lightly.

From the OP: "There is just more disagreement and dissension than you would know unless you took the time to reach out to people and speak to them in a more relaxed way.

My strong suspicion is that this is true across domains of expertise, and is creating a lot of bubbles of fake consensus that can become very misleading. And I don’t have a solution."

I've also found this to be true on HN, though slightly less so. The above comment might be an example, where it oversimplifies something and everyone just appears to agree.

> There is just more disagreement and dissension than you would know unless you took the time to reach out to people and speak to them in a more relaxed way.

That's been my biggest problem with most conversation I have. Nuance has been lost.

> fake consensus that can become very misleading

It's PREFERENCE FALSIFICATION / Social desirebility bias: Preference falsification is the act of misrepresenting one’s wants under perceived social pressures. It shapes collective decisions, orients structural change, sustains social stability, distorts human knowledge, and conceals political possibilities. Preference falsification is the act of communicating a preference that differs from one's true preference. The public frequently convey, especially to researchers or pollsters, preferences that differ from what they truly want, often because they believe the conveyed preference is more acceptable socially. It include the unexpected fall of communism, the paucity, until recently, of open opposition to affirmative action in the United States, and the durability of the beliefs that have sustained India’s caste system:

https://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?isbn=9780674707580

Why would anyone admit to being a [Insert anything against the establishment/mainstream media narrative]? You just get vilified and attacked.

I know several people and many qualified people (doctors) who got banned from YouTube, FB, IG, Twitter, Reddit and got "Disinformation" label slapped on their posts. Even on HN itself, there was a strange stink in the responses to a few of my comments simply stating that we shouldn't simply ignore this theory. Most people were responding with links to places like Snopes, Politifact, NYTimes, WaPo, MSNBC etc - places which have shown their biases several times in history but people kept trusting them as "authoritative" sources. The "fact checkers" were doing nothing more than narrative control but it was enough to chastise people. Some were really mean comments. I would expect such responses from Reddit but I wasn't expecting it on HN. The biggest irony was that we were being accused of being in a cult.

Does anyone think these platforms will now go back and "uncensor" those accounts? Will apologies be issued? I doubt it.

You really hit the nail on the head with this comment.

Frankly I wish you were a journalist more than this author that we are commenting on. He lacks your judgment.

Just to add to your point the most obvious tell for these kinds of suppression activities is the utter lack of curiosity.

It should have been a trigger for curiosity and investigation immediately that this virus happened to emerge in the same city as China's only BSL4 lab. You know the BSL4 lab with NIH and NAID grants specifically specifying taking bat born Corona viruses and infecting humanized mice with them.....

Curious journalists would have identified these earlier.

Unfortunately, journalist these days appear to really really enjoy dunking on each other on Twitter and doing anything they can to own the right winger / white supremacist / whatever they are calling people that don't agree with everything they say.

That doesn't take much brains it just takes an affinity for sadistic behavior.

Is HN any better? I got censored and ridiculously rate limited today for trying to post a similar article.

>Is HN any better?

On topics that are so niche there are no discernible ideological battle lines it can be decent.

Many HN users seem confident they know the truth, and that they know which sources are credible, and are comfortable suppressing anything contrary to what they already think, often without explanation. I don't think HN is quite an echo chamber yet, but it's well on its way.

A to the men

Woah woah woah who says the earth isn’t flat?

> I don't want my app reminding me to vote/get vaccinated(I did both btw) every time I open it

I basically agree with the sentiment, but some of this stuff is tricky. We really do need everyone to get vaccinated, in the same way we need everyone to not dump their sewage in the middle of the street, in order to protect the health of the public at large.

Imagine we were living during WWII and having this discussion. Would you feel differently? Because I don’t think we could have won the war if we were simultaneously having major internal debates about who the good guys were.

Which "we" are you speaking for here - since you're saying you won the war I guess you must be Soviet? You were having major debates about who the good guys were at the time - you had a non-aggression pact with Japan right up until the final weeks, and that very much affected the course of the war.

The same goes for everyone else. France had major internal debates about who the good guys were. So did the UK. So did the USA. So did Ireland. Everyone took took particular actions on particular timelines, made particular compromises, and they were right to do so.

As far as I can tell this is a false premise. The scientific consensus on zoonotic origin was never really considered conclusive by anyone and was never really sold as being conclusive. There was a very strong backlash against the ridiculous theories spread by people like Tom Cotton that virus was engineered that absolutely soured the debate. And people like Trump and his sycophants who didn't just suggest lab leak but declared it as being overwhelmingly likely. That made honest debate extremely difficult. And even know the hand-wringing of "oh now they were right all along" is even worse. There was not then nor is there now sufficient evidence to declare this a settled debate. Trump is and was wrong. And Cotton shot himself the foot by ruining his credibility before trying to reset his opinion. In reality, we don't know. Zoonotic remains most likely. More investigation is warranted but is unlikely to turn up a smoking gun.

How can you read this then casually say Tom Cotton was spreading ridiculous theories that covid was engineered? One of the main points in the article is he never said that and what he did say was pretty reasonable. It’s ok if you think the article is wrong about that, but you should at least give a source for your claim at this point.

You’re incorrect on nearly all of this and haven’t “broken out” of the forced narrative. All I can suggest is you go back to the primary sources yourself. Don’t take my word for it, don’t take your preferred media outlet’s word for it. Dig it up and decide.

The lab leak is overwhelmingly likely. It’s the Occam’s Razor without question. It’s still a hypothesis to be clear. It’s not proven. It could be wrong. But if we are assigning probabilities, it’s extremely one sided. It should have been the leading hypothesis from the beginning.

But Trump said it, so it must be wrong. We must find reasons for it to be not only wrong, but worthy of ridicule. And when those narratives fall, we must keep shifting the goal posts. And when that doesn’t work anymore, we must blame our failure on republicans in some roundabout way.

Sorry, that’s not how we science. We have to put the damn political tribal warfare away for a minute.

Reminder that Facebook and Twitter banned users for talking about the lab-leak theory. Youtube accounts also got demontized/banned.

This should be the top comment. Social media companies can either be monopolies or they can put limits on the speech of their platform... but they can't do both.

While not against the law of freedom of speech, political moderation processes are certainly against the intent. Every once in a while we get a case like this where an unpopular fringe opinion becomes mainstream and underlines the point. But this isn't just a matter of Facebook / Twitter / YouTube needing a better moderation process - this is more fundamental. No person or organization - no matter how benevolent or wise - should have the power to declare truth in a society.

Fringe opinions need constitutional protection - regardless of the era or the technology.

What I would do, if elected Emperor over this, is to add warnings or links to debunkings of fringe theories, but never delete them.

The power to silence will always be abused.

Good thing they aren't monopolies, then. Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Twitch, TikTok, and Reddit are are all very popular places for people to post their views. And that's not counting the myriad lesser places like the one we're using now. And of course anybody can drop a few bucks on a blog of their own.

I also disagree that sites moderating is against the intent. Freedom of speech is one right, but so is freedom of association. Should HN be required by law to platform anybody with an "unpopular fringe opinion"? I'd say no. Using government power to force participation in speech someone finds odious is just as bad as using government power to shut down speech.

This argument seems to assume that Internet hosting is like air — a natural resource which by default is available for everyone to use, but social media companies restrict unfairly.

As everyone here should know, it’s not like that: hosting can be awfully expensive, especially for media content. Social media companies receive money from advertisers, and use that money to host content from users and partners that hopefully makes those ads look appealing too. It’s that simple.

Should these companies be compelled by the government to display content that makes their customers (advertisers) look bad? That seems like an awfully deep intrusion into a private business.

If the social media companies truly were monopolies, that would be another thing. But it’s hard to make that argument when new entrants like Snap and TikTok are able to conquer entire market segments and reach $100B valuations in a matter of years.

I agree with you in spirit, though I feel like the issue is more about whether social media are common carriers [1] or publishers.

They shield themselves when they claim to be a carriers, yet act like publishers. The monopoly aspect, I agree, would be more important to speech, given they behave as publishers of what you may as well consider on-spec content.

I'd like to get clear on to what degree they should be considered carriers or publishers.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_carrier

Not all opinions deserve equal airtime. Fringe opinions should have to work harder to get to the mainstream. Isn’t that exactly what happened here? This is the fringe opinion that had the most inherent value and it’s proved that by breaking through. IMO I wish the platforms had censored more bad info than this. It’s crazy to me that there isn’t more friction for bad ideas.

There's also systematic censorship and disinformation against prophylaxis and early treatment information, which could prevent millions of hospitalisations and deaths. [1]

e.g. YouTube recently censored the Ivermectin Global Summit, in which doctors and scientists showed the overwhelming scientific evidence for Ivermectin from around the world. [2]

1. https://covid19criticalcare.com/videos-and-press/flccc-relea...

2. https://www.reddit.com/r/ivermectin/comments/nj9713/ivermect... (video with timestamps and my summary of the key points)

A recently released meta—analysis from the British Medical Journal suggests that the evidence base for ivermectin’s efficacy in treating COVID-19 is low.

https://ebm.bmj.com/content/early/2021/05/26/bmjebm-2021-111...

Insane

How can you be so gung-ho with relatively new vaccines, but bury relatively benign and longer standing interventions?

Facebook's policy page only mentions censoring content suggesting that the virus was "man-made". Did Twitter actually ban users who suggested _only_ that the virus leaked from a lab? I'd be surprised because I follow some fairly big accounts there which have posted about the lab leak theory.

https://about.fb.com/news/2020/04/covid-19-misinfo-update/

There's a bit of a fuzzy overlap between "man made" and "lab leak".

Specifically, the lab leak theory more or less assumes that the virus was collected from the mine, taken to Wuhan, and some research and experiments were done on it, resulting it some changes. Certainly the lab was doing research; there's an ongoing debate over what they did, who funded it, whether what they did technically qualifies as "gain of function" research, what practical impact the research could reasonably have been predicted to have, etc.

Still, if your theory is that the lab took a bat virus, performed some research on it such as "serial passaging" to determine if it could mutate to become more infectious to humans, the virus does mutate (thus proving the hypothesis), and then a sample of the mutated virus is accidentally leaked...

...that seems like a plausible theory, and it's now showing up in mainstream discussions; eg, https://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/coronavirus-lab-esca.... But I could easily imagine that being considered a suggestion the virus was "man-made", and censored.

What’s the difference? I suppose it is possible that the Wuhan bat hunters found this virus occurring naturally and just, you know, kept it around without telling anyone...

There’s only a spec of difference. I don’t know anyone suggesting that the lab leak was of a natural origin. The theory is that the lab created the virus and it leaked.

I'm generally in favour of the actions taken against misinformation but this situation surprises me. Lab leak always seemed plausible and non-crazy even if you think the odds are against it.

I don't envy the task of making a call on any of this stuff.

If we accept that taking action against misinformation is good, then this sort of mistake will inevitably happen.

If you're in favor of taking action against misinformation, then you should be willing to accept this situation as an acceptable failure. I'm not willing to accept that.

This is a good example of why opponents to actions against misinformation oppose it. Nobody should make these calls because the wrong call will be made eventually, and the power to silently mediate and manipulate discourse is very tempting.

>I'm generally in favour of the actions taken against misinformation...

Who would be the one to determine what is misinformation and what is not?

Frankly the odds of a lab leak are much greater than a bat virus from a thousand miles away jumping across two species in a the Wuhan market.

This is a good example of why I don't say things like I'm "generally in favour of actions taking against misinformation."

We shouldn't take any action, at least at a governmental level. And certainly not on the level of a big corporation like Facebook.

It's very embarrassing that Facebook and YouTube banned this.

It’s misinformation until we tell you otherwise citizen!

If your pursuing a misinformation campaign it does make since to occasionally publish some facts. That way people can wring their hands if they should ban you or not, and so your supporters have something to say that you were right about.

I'm not sure whether it's plausible to non-experts like you or me is a valuable way to categorize it. But the reason to be cautious about it is the potential for violence. Both at an individual level against people perceived as Asian and at a global level of a hot war. A good example here is after 9/11. The US had a rash of violence against people who people thought looked Muslim, like the Sikh gas station owner Balbir Singh Sodhi [1]. We ended up invading not just Afghanistan but Iraq and we still haven't brought all the troops home.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murder_of_Balbir_Singh_Sodhi

> Reminder that Facebook and Twitter banned users for talking about the lab-leak theory.

Can we define/refine the concept of "lab-leak theory" a bit? Because some of the stuff floating around a year ago was a bit unhinged from reality:

> You’ve probably heard the rumor: The new coronavirus is a bioweapon. Some malicious country—perhaps the United States, maybe China, depending on who’s talking or tweeting—purposefully unleashed the virus that causes Covid-19 on the world.

* https://thebulletin.org/2020/03/why-do-politicians-keep-brea...

> Ebright helped The Washington Post debunk a claim that the COVID-19 outbreak can somehow be tied to bioweapons activity, a conspiracy theory that’s been promoted or endorsed by the likes of US Sen. Tom Cotton, Iran’s supreme leader, and others.

> But Ebright thinks that it is possible the COVID-19 pandemic started as an accidental release from a laboratory such as one of the two in Wuhan that are known to have been studying bat coronaviruses.

* https://thebulletin.org/2020/03/experts-know-the-new-coronav...

"In the Shadow of Biological Warfare: Conspiracy Theories on the Origins of COVID-19 and Enhancing Global Governance of Biosafety as a Matter of Urgency":

> Two theories on the origins of COVID-19 have been widely circulating in China and the West respectively, one blaming the United States and the other a highest-level biocontainment laboratory in Wuhan, the initial epicentre of the pandemic. Both theories make claims of biological warfare attempts. According to the available scientific evidence, these claims are groundless.

* https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7445685/

This is classic “nurse vs. feminist nurse” cognitive distortion. Whether the virus was developed as a bio weapon, or simply as a product of well-intentioned gain-of-function research, is irrelevant to the factual basis of whether or not it escaped from the lab. We don’t need to establish how and why it was created, only that it was, in order to assess the likelihood of lab release as a root cause of the pandemic.

Exactly what many were warning about with big tech censorship and getting vilified for it. But it's good if it fails quickly and conclusively, instead of taking years to get to that point.

That’s a good point. At least the censorship failed quickly and completely. It’s clear it was the wrong thing to do.

Google also pinned the first result for any query about the WIV to an article claiming that there was no way whatsoever the virus came from there.

That’s awful, I hope they are thoroughly embarrassed.

Remember - people were called fascists + racists for mentioning or discussing the lab leak theory.

Remember, the discussion of the lab leak theory is strongly correlated with a rise in hate crimes against Asian-Americans. There were also lots of links made between the lab leak theory and needing to tighten immigration policies to keep out "undesirables".

And today Facebook lifted that ban:

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2021/may/27/facebook-...

The theory that "SARS-CoV-2 leaked from the Wuhan lab" overlaps some with the theory that "SARS-CoV-2 was man-made", but they're not the same thing. According to the article Facebook's policy change is towards posts saying "SARS-CoV-2 was man-made". Did Facebook's policy ban posts which supported the "lab leak" theory but didn't claim the virus was "man-made"?

Facebook's April 2020 covid-19 policy notice only mentions "man-made". https://about.fb.com/news/2020/04/covid-19-misinfo-update/

It’s all about the narrative, comrade. That their enforcement is so incredibly in sync is where more scandal resides.

And a reminder that the majority of HN supported them in doing that because we needed to "fight disinformation".

Twitter users got banned in early February 2020 because they were sharing images and videos from locked-down Wuhan that were deemed as inappropriate.

I know that my main information source on the virus back at the time was a Chinese lady expat living in the States who was writing for Epoch Times, not the most credible source generally speaking but on this she was ahead of the MSM by at least a day, that is when the MSM wasn’t ignoring what was happening in China completely.

Wuhan discussing "synthetically derived viruses": https://web.archive.org/web/20200212011902/http://english.wh...

2017 conference at (Wuhan Institute of a virology) with gain of function research being top priority: http://english.whiov.cas.cn/Exchange2016/International_Confe...

Ecohealth Alliance partnership: https://web.archive.org/web/20210323171425/http://english.wh...

US Gov from state department: http://web.archive.org/web/20210116001621/https://www.state....

EcoHealth Alliance Peter Daszak discussing gene editing in coronaviruses in december 2019 - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5-Y843FFJvI

Note: The documentation isn’t even new... all those people banned and censored via Facebook, Twitter, Google, etc [1], have been saying this the entire time. Its kind of amazing to watch both realities (left wing media va alternative media) collide. Gives me hope to be honest.

[1] https://www.projectveritas.com/news/breaking-facebook-whistl...

Also a reminder that "right wing" is such a wonderful term. Mention it, and all the discussion that you don't like can be easily shrugged off, or better, attacked.

Really, why is it so important that we need to pitch left against right? Why can we establish facts, carry out reasoning, and be explicit about interpretation vs conclusion?

How many countries can thrive when all that matters is partisanship or moralizing everything? Maybe Americans should learn a little history about Ming dynasty: The Tung-lin-tang turned everything into evil vs. good, to the point that the government couldn't get anything done and the ruling class couldn't get any fact straight. A dynasty with hundreds of millions of people was conquered by a barbarous tribe, and the entire nation became the laugh stock of the world in merely 150 years (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Macartney_Embassy).

By the way, Tung-lin-tang were experts of mind reading. Their most effective method of attacking their political opponent is to attack their motive. To them, narrative was all that matters.

If it makes you feel better, it's now flagged here, too.

The reputations of media outlets, social or otherwise, are to be protected at all costs.

Because congress bullied them into removing covid misinformation (admittedly mostly relating to vaccines): https://observer.com/2021/03/covid-vaccine-misinformation-fa...

This is true of almost all the social media "censorship" by the way. They have multiple governments either directly passing laws requiring content removal, or pressuring them to remove more.

Facebook, Twitter, and much of the news media have been in the service of CCP as part of an influence operation and suppression of dissent.

There needs to be an investigation. The people involved in these decisions need to be put under oath and testify how they came to the decision to ban users. Emails and messages should be subpoenaed to see if there was illegal coordination across services. There needs to be an complete investigation if any of the people involved were being influenced by or were agents of the CCP.

and here on hacker news the pure science behind this topic was also buried many many times.

Yes, 90% of my downvotes received are from those comment threads... some serious griefing on this topic

Reminder that Facebook and Twitter banned users for talking about the lab-leak theory. Youtube accounts also got demontized/banned.

Let's call it for what it is - employees of Facebook and Twitter and Google were complicit in a coverup of malfeasance that cost hundreds of thousands of lives if not more. Named individuals set these policies and put them into action - they need to be exposed and held accountable.

CNN and WP ran headlines on how Fauci shattered Trumps' lab leak lies in 2020. The scorn and derision was palpable.

Fauci has now completely inverted his statement...

It's one more example of how yesterday's "misinformation" can become tomorrow's "information", and how dangerous it is for sites to censor entire conversations because they (or their so-called 'fact checkers') believe in one side of a narrative.

Will there be apologies given to the people banned, isolated from participating in socialization during a pandemic where online communication was a vital tool for human connection?

This makes me furious

What if deadalus’ claim is not true?

https://about.fb.com/news/2020/04/covid-19-misinfo-update/

I do not see where discussion lab leak is prohibited.

Have you got a link to examples? I’m wondering if they weren’t also saying that China deliberately leaked the virus.

Saying “it is possible but very unlikely that the virus leaked from a Wuhan lab” is talking about the lab-leak theory. Saying “the virus was cooked up and leaked from a Wuhan lab to hurt Trump’s re-election chances” is also talking about the lab-leak theory.

A Infamous case was Twitter baning Zerohedge because of it.

And all that Zerohedge did was point out a lot of public documents, nothing private, and no bioweapon theory. (Twitter claimed Zerohedge had doxxed the scientist, but Zerohedge only had shown the official lab website and documents from it).

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/twitter-bans-zero-hedge-coronav...

Zerohedge getting banned from Twitter for publishing an expose of the Wuhan Lab which is pretty close to what is acknowledged as a probable story these days is the most high profile example.

https://www.zdnet.com/article/zerohedge-banned-from-twitter-...

And the amount of evidence in both cases is equal right now - slim and circumstantial. Just because one is political doesn't make it more worthy of censorship if you're removing content based on "misinformation." There's no real evidence underlying either statement.

Apparently they did so in consultation with the WHO :)

I thought they banned man-made claims not lab-leak claims.

I hate how it feels like there's such a "collective narrative" for everything now days with the internet.

Whenever I talk to people about recent news stories in real life it feels like everyone is just repeating talking points they read online.

Its like we've been absorbed into the internet consciousness and talking to a person is like talking to "the internet brain".

Thanks for speaking this out loud. I've been feeling the same thing. What's weird is I've been having identical conversations with people from multiple US states and several European countries. There used to be an enormous gap between people from different areas and countries, each existing in their own cultural bubble. Now that's changed, and I'm not talking about "closer" I'm talking "the exact same."

Our opinions have always been easily shaped by the media, mass entertainment and political campaigning. But lately it seems like there's less an ocean of information and more like a small puddle we're all trying to drink from at once. At the same time, the Overton Window seems to be slamming shut.

I have been suspecting this has all been a dress rehearsal for the societal changes that are coming soon to address climate change, a sort of "powering up" of the collective consciousness.

I agree and have experienced what you wrote, except I have no idea what your last paragraph means. What are you referring to / talking about? It feels like maybe an example of the phenomenon we're talking about lol

There used to be a lot of media, with a lot of different motivations. Now there are only a couple of major companies running most of it, and a small number of sources that everyone else rewrites.

They're scared they might say something wrong and get fired, shamed, and ex-communicated.

Who isn't?

The people that answered "I'm not" to that question, those people are the problem.

Let's get them fired, shamed, and ex-communicated.

I might believe that more if all the people I know IRL who talk about being afraid of being fired/cancelled/whatever weren't also the exact same people shitting out talking point after talking point from the exact same news sources with no critical thought whatsoever.

People stopped reading the source material, and started just parroting the talking points. It's even gotten to the point where people are even convinced the talking points are the source material.

My shit test for "is this article likely a bunch of FUD or just outright BS" is if they actually link to the source material. If they don't, I usually continue reading it but make a mental note that they're likely pushing some specific version of the event or facts in question.

Genuine question: were people ever reading the source material? Seems like a dubious claim that folks of yesteryear read deeply into original sources. Most people read headlines and attention grabbing quotes and this was just as true 100 years ago. I recently read about the Russian revolution and it was similar to today.

There's very little real reporting. Most of it is regurgitation of one source article for any given story. Very often that source article is fabricated for a purpose.

"Let your ideas be second-hand, and if possible tenth-hand, for then they will be far removed from that disturbing element — direct observation." The Machine Stops, page 18

Human centipede baby

Absolutely. Discussion with friends about the goings ons of the world frequently just turns into taking turns regurgitating what we can recall from NPR and NYT's The Daily.

It's ironic to even call those experiences discussions when no new ideas are exchanged. It's just people of the same worldview taking turns chanting verses of their creed. Nothing learned nor imparted.

What sources would you recommend instead?

Isn't that how it's always been. People just regurgitate the media they consume. It used to be sermons at church. Then it moved to print, radio and tv. Now it expanded to the internet/social media. Whether we like it or not, we've all been programmed by the media that we consume.

"Whoever controls the media controls the mind" - Jim Morrison

Perhaps because the proper honest statement that vast majority of people can make is ‘I have no clue about any of this’.

To honestly make that statement, it would first require conscious awareness of it. I believe that this is the root problem: people, even smart people, are literally unable to realize that they do not know under certain conditions. On certain topics (fight or flight mode?), it's like the mind stops supporting trinary logic and downgrades to binary only.

Consider this: how frequently do you find the logical styles so common in this thread in threads where the topic is technology or things of that sort?

"everyone is just repeating talking points they read online"

The collective narrative has existed in other media for as long as I've been alive. It's now invaded the internet.

People have always listened to the radio, watched cable news, read magazines to get talking points so they can repeat them and appear well informed and intelligent. To look good in front of others and convey status. People who counter the narrative are seen as low status, conspiracy theorists, cranks, disagreeable. My advice to anyone is to just repeat the narrative. I haven't and I have suffered. In the end, no one will remember that you were right. It's not worth it. Keep your contrary opinions to yourself or share them anonymous online, take positions to make money when you are proven right, but don't declare it. Unless your business is being counter narrative.

It's been a while but I think the chapter “WHAT MAKES A MESSAGE REPEATABLE? Techniques to Convince Others to Repeat Your Words” from the book “Impossible to Ignore.” by Carmen Simon discusses the science of how to make this happen.

This has been a horrifically sad accepted reality of US higher education for a generation. Students are easily-influenced, naive, and economically vulnerable.

It has always been like this. Everyone always repeated talking points they heard in the mainstream media. Always.

I think it's an unfortunate effect of mass media. If anything however I think the internet made it 1% better, not worse.

I wrote about the change from a world of actual dialogue to one of mass media, here: https://simonsarris.substack.com/p/are-we-still-thinking

> Whenever I talk to people about recent news stories in real life it feels like everyone is just repeating talking points they read online.

Would you mind sharing some examples, as well as the counterpoint arguments you add to the real life conversation?

I've seen claims like this before, and it almost always comes from people who get their news from places like Zerohedge or Infowars.

You seem to have a real beef with Zerohedge.

Ironically, their twitter account was banned precisely for reporting on the possibility that the virus was a lab leak:

https://finance.yahoo.com/news/zerohedge-twitter-ban-over-co...

A thread about how the mainstream media is eating crow over being so wrong here is not really the best place in the world for you to grind your axe with Zerohedge.

Also, what are info wars?

Yeah I’m curious too..like do people remember a time when everyone formed unique and contrasting views about national subjects they didn’t personally have in depth domain knowledge of? Whats the expectation here?

The extinction of species and even languages triggers mass self-examination. But entire cultures are currently evolving at a speed and in a direction that will essentially lead to their extinction within two or three generations, and few people are mourning the loss yet.

Human nature being what it is, my unborn American great-grandson will feel he has little in common with any randomly-chosen Cambodian of his time, but the truth is that they'll listen to the same music, play the same video games, watch the same movies, argue across the same political spectrum, speak the same language, and get their education and news from an elite that is even more globally homogeneous than they are.

This isn't a "now" thing. Most people and even most policy makers can't fully digest such complicated topics so they rely on people they trust.

The media is so disappointing these days. A lot of people don't remember this, but the mainstream media outlets were actually playing down the coronavirus pandemic at the start. Then they attacked the travel ban to China. Then did a complete U-turn. Pelosi was dancing in the streets of Chinatown San Francisco to prove how safe and not racist she is. It seemed like they hated Trump and would fight anything he did.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/time-for-a-reality-che...

https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2020/02/03/why-we-sho...

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/18/world/europe/coronavirus-...

https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2020/01/29/8008132...

I saw a viral clip of the Kayleigh McEnany pointing out this hypocrisy and the immediate response as she dropped the mic and walked off was someone in the press shouting "you were prepared for that!". No shit she was prepared for that? That's her job? How is that a bad thing? Oh, because your gotcha question didn't work. Ridiculous.

> Pelosi was dancing in the streets of Chinatown San Francisco to prove how safe and not racist she is.

Why does this keep coming up?

This was literally a problem at the time: a pandemic in China was resulting in a huge amount of local racism and ostracism of American Chinese descendants and expats, people who, by you know, being in a completely different country, weren't somehow magically more dangerous then anyone else.

The absolute most racist and non-sensical reaction people had to COVID-19 was to immediately decide that local asian people were immediately dangerous viral vectors.

You know what else was a bigger problem at the time? The coronavirus.

I'm not disappointed the media got Covid wrong at various points in time. Most people got Covid wrong at the beginning. And almost everyone, including me, has had a bad Covid take at least once.

I didn't see Covid coming. And if someone really saw it coming, they could have made thousands/millions shorting the stock market (and some people did).

Point is, I don't view this as grounds to attack the media. I do find it disappointing that the media is usually not willing to admit their mistakes, and usually doesn't do a good job at expressing scientific uncertainty.

>Pelosi was dancing in the streets of Chinatown San Francisco to prove how safe and not racist she is.

Maybe it's just me, but I can't find this. Can you send a link?

Not surprised you can't find it. I feel as if it would have been easier to find had the other side done it.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yK8P8FQWozA

Here it is: https://abc7news.com/sf-chinatown-pelosi-san-francisco-coron...

Not exactly dancing in the streets, but definitely encouraging people not to fear.

None of the articles you cite demonstrate what you seem to think they do. When the number of cases was minuscule, the threat to Americans was low and those articles were spot on: Keep vigilant, get your flu shot, but don't stress too much yet. Citing Pelosi visiting San Francisco (at a time when there were zero cases in the region, but a growing number of anti-Asian hate crimes) again doesn't make a point to any reasonable person. These claims speak only to zealots.

More critically, you have a higher standard of every random article in every newspaper than you do of agencies actually responsible. Which is truly dystopian.

Speaking of which, Trump's "travel ban" (that wasn't a travel ban) was the single action taken after the virus was already spreading uncontrolled in NY, Washington State, and Europe. It did nothing to restrict US citizens traveling to and from the affected areas unrestrained, which thousands continued to do, even if we believed it would be remotely effective at that point. It did nothing for testing or tracing. It was the laziest, least-effort action possible. And to be clear, long after all of these things, Trump declared that the number of cases would soon be 0. He made similar "nothingburger" comments for months.

But you find issue with the media.

Incredible.

No, every bit of cynicism about the media coverage of travel bans seems 100% justified. For context, I'm from the UK where we have a right-wing Brexit-supporting government that's perceived very much as a Trump analogue - except they didn't impose travel bans on places like China early in the pandemic. Which means that over here, people blame our pandemic deaths on the supposed fact that our Government avoided placing restrictions on travel because they're evil right-wingers who were too worried about the damage to the economy that would cause. There was literally a talking point where the Guardian dug up an estimate that imposing travel restrictions on China would've delayed the outbreak here by something like a month, but it had to be a ban on all travellers who'd been in China within 14 days and not just direct travel - that is, it specifically had to be a Trump-style travel ban, an Italy-style one would not have worked. Meanwhile, their US coverage was attacking Trump for his travel ban.

Also, remember that the current US president literally went from using the idea that travel bans were dangerous, counterproductive and made things worse in his electoral campaign to reinstating them with the exact same rules as Trump used as his first act in office, and the mainstream media cheered him on every step of the way...

> More critically, you have a higher standard of every random article in every newspaper than you do of agencies actually responsible. Which is truly dystopian.

> But you find issue with the media.

> Incredible.

The HN topic is about the media, so I'm talking about the media.

> Speaking of which, Trump's "travel ban" (that wasn't a travel ban) was the single action taken after the virus was already spreading uncontrolled in NY, Washington State, and Europe. It did nothing to restrict US citizens traveling to and from the affected areas unrestrained, which thousands continued to do, even if we believed it would be remotely effective at that point

I'm not defending Trump. I'm pointing out media hypocrisy. What did they do? Call the travel ban racist. Their behaviour has been very partisan, often at the expense of the truth. Exhibit A: the lab leak theory in the OP.

> It did nothing to restrict US citizens traveling to and from the affected areas unrestrained, which thousands continued to do

I thought the federal government does not even have the legal power to do so. Personally, though, I think giving local government more power is a genius design by the founding fathers.

> was the single action taken after the virus was already spreading uncontrolled in NY, Washington State, and Europe.

I'm not sure if this claim is true, either. Trump did at least two things: 1. Signed a deal with pharma companies to promise that the federal government would buy their vaccines to every American so the companieswould be all in to develop vaccines. 2. Promised to give resources to state governments. Both Cuomo of NY and Newsom of CA thanked government for keeping its promises.

This last year alone has made me lose more faith in the democratic party and the media altogether. Not only did they push a radical agenda with retribution, they did it like religious people used to do centuries ago. Don't challenge the status quo or face reprecussions (fine, demobilization, banned). Now egg on their faces.

The media, the left, and big tech are all clearly working on the same agenda.

Over the last several years, it's become clear to me what the large social media companies want to be: de facto world governments.

They won't admit that, and you'll hear a lot of gab about algorithms and cooperation with various governments, but at heart it appears to me that this is cooperation with various governments as a government themselves. It's a negotiation among equals.

We can provincially argue about who can say what in the US on which platforms, or what the rules _might_ be to demonetize and/or kick people off platforms, but at the end of the day, the platforms themselves, through means mostly opaque to us, are negotiating as if they were our local tyrannical government with complete control over the public square and public places.

I understand that for many this is completely far-fetched and I'm making a mountain out of a molehill. This is a difficult thing to freely admit and grasp. It's also very difficult for those that are currently happy with whatever the most recent decisions are.

Yes, the net is still (mostly) free and open, and competitors _might_ come along and take the place of the current major social networks, but at heart this is a problem based on generalizing and universally abstracting social interactions. You could split up and/or dismantle every major player today and be in the exact same spot five or ten years from now when the next ones come along.

I am happy that more and more people are finally waking up to the danger here. If we are allowed to adequately describe the nature of this problem, we might have a shot at fixing it.

Social media companies just want to make money. It's people who want social media companies to act like government. Originally, Facebook was pro free speech because in a vacuum that's what would make the most money. Facebook only started censoring when people started complaining about it.

> Social media companies just want to make money.

Being a government is definitely the best and easiest way to make money.

I also yearn for more competition in social media. It's wild to think that Facebook has been a huge player for most of the history of the web.

That's a pretty bizarre take considering how incredibly narrow their authority is. The hottest hot takes on this topic all came from elected officials and second-rate professional media.

The US federal government is basically a giant case of regulatory capture so many people understandably confuse power and influence. However the distinction remains and it is of essential importance. None of the big tech companies have any real power, all they have is influence. In countries where they don’t have politicians under their influence they are helpless.

I _almost_ am completely on your side in this discussion. The facts of the matter are as you describe.

I disagree, however. Influence at the scale these companies have is its own power. There's a reason Zuckerberg is a fan of Caesar Augustus; with the proper and delicate application of influence in the right places, you can get whatever it is you want.

The game they're playing is not direct application of political power, it's subtly using influence over a decade or two to position world governments where they want them. If I had to guess, they'll leave those governments in place as polite fictions, much as the Roman Senate continued to "defend" the Republic for a long, long time after Augustus changed all of that.

By the way, astute observers in various governments know the game being played, it's just very difficult to directly move against companies that appear to be cooperating. Folks want their Farmvilles. My money says that we'll see a lot more regulatory capture with various reforms over the next few years, the political calculus being that it's better to absorb them than fight them (at least short term, which is good enough to get elected a few more times).

One problem with politically charged issues is that one's bias can significantly color unresolved factual issues. In the article the early 'red flags' pointed out in the January 2020 study by The Lancet left clear open questions regarding the Seafood Market hypothesis, but many in the media glossed over these red flags. Now that additional facts are coming to light including the fact that multiple scientists at the lab were hospitalized with Covid like symptoms in late 2019, the facts are starting to pierce through the early dismissal of the lab leak theory by many journalists. I think this will result in a rethink of how we tag unresolved topics as "False Information" or before enough facts are gathered. Perhaps a "Controversial" tag would be preferred. I really like the site https://www.allsides.com/ that provides Left/Center/Right bias indicators for any story so you can read all sides and get the gist of how politics is coloring current stories in the media.

(1) https://www.allsides.com/tags/wuhan-lab?search=wuhan%20lab#g...

>I think this will result in a rethink of how we tag unresolved topics as "False Information" or before enough facts are gathered.

Wishful thinking perhaps, somehow I doubt most of the media/gov't figures who dismissed these claims did so in good faith to begin with.

Please be explicite iF you are going to make such accusations. What "bad faith" reason do you postulate motivated these actions?

> I think this will result in a rethink of how we tag unresolved topics as "False Information" or before enough facts are gathered. Perhaps a "Controversial" tag would be preferred.

If anything, it will taint the credibilty of people who claim they have the insight to tag the information's credibility in the first place.

That would actually be a silver lining in my opinion.

I'm open to the lab leak hypothesis, but the intel around those scientists being hospitalized is pretty weak.

Weren't scientists from the Chinese CDC actually authors of the Lancet article that everyone cited? It doesn't seem like they were trying to push any seafood market hypothesis either.

The author of that article is actually Peter Daszak of Ecohealth Alliance, that was funding the Wuhan lab for gain of function research, seemly using money from US government (NIH and another department I can't recall now).

EDIT: why people are downvoting this? I got something wrong? The Peter Daszak that signed the article is not the same one that runs Ecohealth Alliance?

Related threads:

Wuhan lab staff sought hospital care before Covid-19 outbreak disclosed - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27259953 - May 2021 (343 comments)

How I learned to stop worrying and love the lab-leak theory - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27184998 - May 2021 (235 comments)

More Scientists Urge Broad Inquiry into Coronavirus Origins - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27160898 - May 2021 (341 comments)

The origin of Covid: Did people or nature open Pandora’s box? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27071432 - May 2021 (537 comments)

Scientists who say the lab-leak hypothesis for SARS-CoV-2 shouldn't be ruled out - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26750452 - April 2021 (618 comments)

Why the Wuhan lab leak theory shouldn't be dismissed - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26540458 - March 2021 (985 comments)

The Lab Leak Hypothesis - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25640323 - Jan 2021 (229 comments)

Israeli startup claims Covid-19 likely originated in a lab, willing to bet on it - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25585833 - Dec 2020 (351 comments)

Wuhan lab did research on bat viruses, but no evidence of accidental release - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23070031 - May 2020 (76 comments)

Experts disagree on whether Covid-19 could have leaked from a research lab - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22695825 - March 2020 (6 comments)

There were also a number of HN stories posted early in the pandemic concerning the lab-leak hypothesis. These paint a ... complicated ... picture of that theory and those who advocated for it. Few of the submissions had any significant discussion, I'm simply going off what was submitted to HN.

Search, bound from 2020-1-1 to 2020-6-1: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateEnd=1593475200&dateRange=custom&...

26 March 2020: Experts disagree on whether Covid-19 could have leaked from a research lab https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22695825 https://thebulletin.org/2020/03/experts-know-the-new-coronav... (Note this was from a modification of the above search)

28 March 2020: Scientific community MUST rally to expose likely leak from a Wuhan lab https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22710662 (no link)

6 April 2020: Trump says U.S. investigating whether virus came from Wuhan lab https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22886182 https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus-trump-...

30 April 2020: Nobel Prize winner who discovered HIV says covid19 is from Wuhan lab,has HIV DNA https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23037036 https://www.cnews.fr/france/2020-04-17/le-coronavirus-est-un... (Said Nobelist is an anti-vaxxer.)

1 May 2020: No evidence that deadly bat virus escaped Wuhan lab https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23041789 https://www.sfgate.com/news/article/No-evidence-that-deadly-... Original source is a Washington Post article from 30 April (https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/chinese-lab...)

4 May 2020: Australian intelligence knocks back US government's Wuhan lab virus claim https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23074121 https://www.smh.com.au/politics/federal/australian-intellige...

10 May 2020: Germany Doubts US Claim of Wuhan Virus Lab Leak https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23130107 http://www.courthousenews.com/germany-doubts-us-claim-of-wuh...

18 May 2020: Busted: Pentagon Contractors’ Report on ‘Wuhan Lab’ Origins of Virus Is Bogus https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23223986 https://www.thedailybeast.com/pentagon-contractors-report-on...

(Note that there may well have been other submissions which were flagged and killed, or which don't match my search terms --- I included one such addition based on a variant of terms.)

In general the early claims of a lab leak:

- Lacked any specific proof.

- Came from sources with questionable credibility.

- Were rejected by others with no specific allignment to those claiming the leak, and with general credibility.

I'll note that the leak hypothesis remains unproven, though the evidence supporting a serious, independent, and pointedly, non-Chinese-led investigation is mounting. I found the Bulletin of Concerned Scientists article a week or so back persuasive.

But the point remains that attributing an original cause to some event is complex, and requires a reality-based investigation grounded in facts rather than ideology or motivated reasoning. Much (though not all) of the lab-leak advocacy has been lacking in this objectivity, and even the most persuasive arguments to date make a case for the possible origin, not a certainty.

I'd argue that for the current outbreak the origin all but certainly does not matter in terms of steps taken to contain and end the outbreak. Preventive measures (themselves reflecting an evolution of understanding over time) and vaccines (rejected by a disappointing fraction of lab-leak enthusiasts) remain the most potent tools we have.

Consideration for costs, and prevention (or early alerting) of future outbreaks do depend in part on determining ultimate origin. That's something to keep an eye on, but not the principle concern of the moment.

> I'd argue that for the current outbreak the origin all but certainly does not matter in terms of steps taken to contain and end the outbreak

It would have mattered a lot back in early 2020, when the (circumstantial) evidence for the lab leak theory was assembled. And I’m not sure what your point is—are you implying that the world is incapable of both handling the pandemic and investigating its origins simultaneously? Like, we are going to get collectively distracted or something? No—investigate the origins now. This is not something to delay on.

Thanks! I've added these two to the above list:

Wuhan lab did research on bat viruses, but no evidence of accidental release - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23070031 - May 2020 (76 comments)

Experts disagree on whether Covid-19 could have leaked from a research lab - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22695825 - March 2020 (6 comments)

The others seem to either have no comments or in one case (the Montagnier one) to be more of a distraction. If I missed any other actual threads, please let me know.

IMO, determining the origin of the virus is of much more consequence than who was right and who was wrong back in 2020. If the virus crossed over naturally, it's reasonable to conjecture that this sort of thing is going to happen more and more often in the future. If it was human error in a lab, I would actually be relieved -- this seems like something that's much easier to correct. FWIW, I do think available evidence supports a lab leak more than any other hypothesis.

I agree that it's extremely important. If it was a lab leak, there are many safety process and regulation improvements we might be highly motivated to make. It's a thing we can actually have some control over. If it was a natural virus, there's good reason to collect and study more pathogens so we have a head start if one of them crosses into humans. Not that both of these things aren't good responses to the pandemic, but having a specific answer will direct more funding at the problem.

Politics has made it very likely that we will never know where it started, but that's okay. More important is how the next one could start, which is being investigated more thoroughly now. If we survive the current and future variants of covid we'll be better placed for the next plague. If not for the systems put in place because of SARS-CoV-1, SARS-CoV-2 could have spread far more widely before being detected.

Regardless of the politics, it's likely that many labs have reviewed their procedures to be sure people won't be infected by their work/contaminate their work.

Is it? We can assume that both things happened and prepare better for both types of development in the future. In the case of lab release, details would have to emerge to be reactive about fixing any issues with procedures. That doesn't mean that we can't be proactive in analyzing current procedures and trying to find and correct weaknesses.

I read spillover a few years ago, which is all about zoonotic crossover events, would recommend it, even if it is a bit dry in parts.

The problem is, as an expansionist species we're naturally going to encroach on natural reservoirs for pathogens.

The smoking gun of people working at the virology institute may yet turn out to be nothing more than a red herring, if they live and work in the epicentre of where the outbreak started, it only stands to reason they'd also run the risk of catching it.

I wanted to add -- the two most compelling pieces of information I've seen that make the lab accident theory more plausible to me are: 1) The verified existence of the bat-originating corona virus that killed 3 miners with Pneumonia some years ago being housed/researched in the WIV 2) David Baltimore of Cal Tech's remark ""When I first saw the furin cleavage site in the viral sequence, with its arginine codons, I said to my wife it was the smoking gun for the origin of the virus. These features make a powerful challenge to the idea of a natural origin for SARS2"

Thanks for the recommendation. I will check this out asap!

To return the favor, I recommend checking out the Lapham's Quarterly issue on "Epidemic" that collected historical writings across many instances of widespread plague and disease.

A bigger issue is how far and fast it travels. We have no surveillance program or early warning system.

Am I the only one who feels like this is mostly a non-issue. I feel like the case of if this came from a lab for from a market is mostly taking a political side against China - if it came from a lab, or for China - if it was naturally developed.

If it came from a Chinese lab as part of a conscious effort of weaponizing a virus, sure, that's important, but I don't think anyone is saying that.

If it came from a lab accidental breach, it is important that the parties involved are aware of that, and steps are taken to improve security.

However, this is an event that happens every century. It's not a one-time thing. We had been warned it was coming. So now it's here.

If the source had been Belgium (just as an example), would the source be covered by the media at all?

Does anybody else feel this way? Yes, the WHO etc needs to continue researching to understand the source. But I don't believe the amount of energy the average person is expending on their "thoughts" really amounts to much at all. It's just the story of the hour.

It matters if it was caused due to gain of function research. These virologists purposely try to make viruses stronger so that they can research how to counteract or fight one if a stronger similar version of them appears from the wild. If this came from making a SARS virus more potent, we should ask the question if the gain of function research that these people do is actually worth the potential costs of that potent variant leaking out.

As well, that kind of research can be repaired with weaponization of viruses. So we need to ask if the research they were doing had a military angle to it at all.

The hard part with authoritarian governments is that they will cover up things even if they are not in the wrong. They don't make mistakes. So they may cover up things that don't actually need to be covered up.

It is very possible that this was just a person being infected with a sample they got from the field. But it seems the Chinese government Doesn't actually want to tell us the truth.

The virus had global implications with a massive economic and global impact.

If a single institution was responsible for this event then it would be clear that we need to improve regulations and safety standards around the entire field of gain of function research.

If a lab leak is a possible explanation, the implication for future gain of function research and associated regulations are massive. It's not as simple as letting the lab in question make their process changes to avoid future global pandemics.

If we can entertain the possibility that this disaster came from gain of function research then surely that field should be reconsidered regardless of what actually happened in this particular case.

> The virus had global implications with a massive economic and global impact.

Interestingly, a very positive economic impact and a rounding-error number of fatalities for a specific country.

I don't think it's the actual facts that are especially problematic, but the rabid antagonistic response to a theory.

Right. As the article argues, it doesn't seem like it would make any difference where the virus came from, which makes the reaction seem strange.

What surely deserves attention is how an idea like "could have come from a lab" is able to shift from 'mild' to 'fringe/controversial' to 'plausible/reasonable to discuss'.

no, the choice is not as you put it, "weaponization vs lab leak of virus that happens to be under study". The likely scenario that's being proposed for the lab-leak is a man-made virus that is quite routine to see in labs like this, in every advanced technology country in the world. The making of dangerous viruses for the purposes of research is quite common, and in order to take steps to improve security, we need openness and transparency about what is going on.

China does, though, very much lack openness and transparency when it comes to owning up to mistakes.

>However, this is an event that happens every century.

Not the first time this century, and not even the first time it happened with a coronavirus, this century, in China.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Severe_acute_respiratory_syndr...

You're not the only one.

A possible lab leak has seemed reasonable, given the circumstances, since early on. If it weren't for all the politics around it, I think it should have gotten a more careful treatment.

Unfortunately, it also became a political football. US-China trade wars were still in full swing at the time and both countries were jockeying for advantages in negotiations. There were lots of political people here that saw "blame China" as a way to force trade concessions, and others who muddied the waters further by going beyond an accident and wondering out loud if it was an engineered weapon.

On The Media recently had a little bit of coverage of this [1] and the guest, Alina Chan, had the completely reasonable conclusion that a science-based approach to investigating a lab leak is merited, that lab accidents do happen, and that if it was discovered to have been a lab leak, then the reaction ought to be to move labs like this one away from dense population centers and enact some quarantining protocols for researchers working with infectious diseases.

But this is still a subject that's going to be difficult to have a grounded discussion about because now it's being used as a political football against perceived media biases and censorship and the failings of liberalism and yadda yadda yadda.

[1]: https://www.wnycstudios.org/podcasts/otm/episodes/on-the-med...

I think further public and political pressure is still needed to ensure a proper investigation occurs (I'm not confident one is ongoing). There is an inflection point at which more pressure becomes actively unhelpful of course.

But I also think the current evidence for a lab leak is far weaker than proponents claim (2 somewhat contradictory unnamed US intel sources saying WIV staff were sick in Nov '19, haven't found the reservoir animal yet, closest match is far away, lab exists in part of Asia where such viruses are known to emerge and also where it would be a good place to put a lab...)

>If the source had been Belgium (just as an example), would the source be covered by the media at all?

Blimey - it would have been headlines in every paper on the planet for weeks if it was shown to be a Belgium lab cock up.

Ah yes, the good old narcissists prayer:

That didn't happen.

And if it did, it wasn't that bad.

And if it was, that's not a big deal.

And if it is, that's not my fault.

And if it was, I didn't mean it.

And if I did, you deserved it

To answer your question before my unprompted musing, I agree. I think the majority of people won't get anything out of understanding the nitty-gritty detail of this discourse, and will spend a lot of energy fending off bipartisan "WE TOLD U SO" bickering along the way. However, appropriate authorities should keep working on the problem, even if just to determine that there's no data to get to the bottom of this at all.

> but I don't think anyone is saying that.

Part of the timeline that seems to miss from some discussions, including the article brought by the OP, is that Donald Trump did in fact make that sort of statements, on several occasions[1], even though you unlikely mean that the same way. While e.g. Cotton's words have not been treated with due rigour by some journalistic media outlets, the social media platform crackdown on the associated terms, in my memory, did happen after Trump's statements had a measurable hate crime effect.

[1] The earliest example - https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus-trump-...

> “But we’re going to find out. You’ll be learning in the not-too-distant future. But it’s a terrible thing that happened - whether they made a mistake or whether it started off as a mistake and then they made another one. Or did somebody do something on purpose?” he said.

In my subjective opinion, the conversation in general both was and still is overall chaotic, often conflating at least some of the following:

1. Natural virus transmitted from source animal. Sensible zoonosis scenario.

2. Natural virus transmitted from "incubating" animal. Sensible zoonosis, again.

3. Natural virus leaving lab due to a storage safety failure. Sensible lab accident scenario.

4. Natural virus leaving lab due to an operations safety failure. Sensible lab accident scenario.

5. Natural virus modified successfully by the lab, doing 3-4. Often deemed less likely, but nonetheless a fundamentally sensible scenario.

6. Natural virus modified successfully by the lab, intentionally released from the lab by the Chinese government. Sometimes this flavour also implies that the virus was modified not with gain-of-function research goal, but with biological warfare goals straight up. Feels the same thing on paper, but in terms of language used the latter is substantially more visceral, evoking defensive reaction. Either way, this does not make any much sense, given economic stakes. CCP may have a heavy-handed enforcement of their interests, but they count their own money better than anyone else.

7. Artificially created virus, doing a 3 or 4. Sometimes with intentionality implication. There doesn't seem to be any significant research supporting this as a plausible scenario.

8. Intentionally (to harm the proverbial West) designed artificial virus, doing a 6. Straight up Tom Clancy's book material.

I've seen "lab leak" applied by some journalists to anything from 3 to 8 including. The problem here is that 6-8 predominantly are political rallying calls for a base eager for a confrontation with China, potentially to detract from anticipated fallout from the domestic containment effort. Much easier to say "woe betide us, this sophisticated oriental bioweapon", than to say "well we have this entire government agency designed to handle this, but everything we've done has fallen flat". The end result of this final bunch of theories was a spike of anti-Asian hate crimes, e.g., someone in my town got imprisoned for anti-Chinese hatred incitement. The last case like that in my memory was in the noughts.

Maybe people will start to understand that it’s very hard to be a unbiased arbitrator of truth and that beyond illegal speech the media and social platforms should let people talk. You have to wonder if the parties were reversed and it was a democrat incumbent president making these claims, would the reaction have been the same. I think if we are being honest to ourselves we know the truth.

What the article forgets to mention is that there is a world power (cough China cough) which would use all its (social-) media manipulation skills and influence to make sure that the lab leak theory was written off as crazy conspiracy talk… Under those circumstances, and without a concerted effort by the US and other democracies to counter China’s preferred narrative, no wonder that the debate turned very lopsided.

Not to mention many of the early proponents were notorious conspiracy theorists, racists, and nut jobs who spoke with absolute certainty, cited virtually no evidence and clearly had no idea what they were talking about. Could they, in their wild speculation, been right about a few things? Sure, that’s always possible, but they didn’t actually know that at the time.

This isn’t a science or mainstream media problem; both require something resembling empirical evidence to make factual claims. It’s a problem of bullshitters, who can just stay stuff. If you want to be clear that they’re full of it, you run the risk that they actually guessed right.

This is an interesting way to evaluate ideas. Where did you learn this technique?

> ... Evidence in favor of leak theory lowers the status of the media and raises the status of Tom Cotton but doesn’t drastically alter the policy landscape.

That's a very peculiar statement coming from someone who just admitted to missing the 21st century's biggest story to date. And I suspect he's now being too quick to discount the effect on not only the political landscape, but the journalistic landscape as well.

It's incredible. If the lab leak theory is true, then a virus escaped from a lab in China and caused the deaths of millions of people. And at the time this happened, the Chinese government did everything it could to hide that from the world. And for some reason, a large part of the US media and tech establishments went along with the ruse and were nice enough to censor or attempt to discredit/destroy anyone who suggested that the virus didn't come from a wet market, but instead possibly came from the Institute of Virology down the street.

And if we somehow find that all of the above is true, there are people who say that this isn't really a big deal from a policy perspective? What in the actual fuck??

If it had been a lab in Colorado, under the nominal supervision of some Trump crony, I think it indeed would have been something of “a big deal from a policy perspective”!

I like Yglesias, but it’s pretty blinkered to limit “policy impact” to “what to do about biological threat research”. Maybe this means having unanswerable autocracies around is bad and we should try (however ineffectually) to change that state of affairs?

Wuhan discussing "synthetically derived viruses": https://web.archive.org/web/20200212011902/http://english.wh...

2017 conference at (Wuhan Institute of a virology) with gain of function research being top priority: http://english.whiov.cas.cn/Exchange2016/International_Confe...

Ecohealth Alliance partnership: https://web.archive.org/web/20210323171425/http://english.wh...

US Gov from state department: http://web.archive.org/web/20210116001621/https://www.state....

EcoHealth Alliance Peter Daszak discussing gene editing in coronaviruses in december 2019 - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5-Y843FFJvI

[1] https://www.projectveritas.com/news/breaking-facebook-whistl...

This story is a real clusterfuck and really hammers home the point that humans are bad at dealing with probabilities and uncertainty. You mix some nationalism in and it becomes completely impossible to have a reasonable discussion.

This article already starts with a false dichotomy: "I missed the furious initial skirmish in what’s become the Long Discourse Wars over the idea that the SARS-CoV-2 virus came from the Wuhan Institute of Virology rather than originating naturally in bats."

Those aren't conflicting hypotheses. If you're having a "war" over that question you need a cold shower and to go offline for a bit. If the institute was somehow involved in spreading the virus, the simplest story is still that they got it from bats. No matter what anyone tells you, there is zero evidence that any part of the virus is engineered (and it isn't even entirely clear what such evidence would look like, in general!).

Either way, no new hard information has become available. The only thing that has changed is we've gone from pure, wild speculation based on the mere existence of the Wuhan virology institute, to wild speculation paired with some suggestive, anecdotal reports that need to be investigated further.

I would agree that this has somewhat changed the probabilities that we should assign to different hypotheses about the origins of the virus, but it's way too early to have strong convictions.

In the absence of any evidence, and in the heated climate of early 2020, it was and will always have been the correct call to ignore the speculation about how the virus might have come from the Wuhan virology institute.

At the present time, there's nothing you can do except hope that more facts will come to light at some point in the future, even if that's somewhat disappointing. Jumping on the story because it's so juicy and fits so great with "China bad" preconceptions is totally unnecessary.

We haven't found an animal host for SARS-CoV-2 yet, after more than 12 months. It took six months to find an animal host for SARS and less than a year for MERS. The incentive for the Chinese government to find a SARS-CoV-2 animal host is much much higher than for either of those viruses. Failure to find the host is not proof of lab origin, but the longer the search goes on unsuccessfully, the more the probabilities shift.

> it was and will always have been the correct call to ignore the speculation about how the virus might have come from the Wuhan virology institute.

No, it was not the correct call, because it means that possibility was not investigated when it should have been.

We've already found animal hosts for SARS-COV2, be haven't found the origin animal. It took two years to find the bats as likely source and another twelve to find the specific species and location, the horseshoe bat. For MERS we only know that dromedary camels are a major reservoir host for MERS-CoV and an animal source of MERS infection in humans. The exact role of dromedaries in transmission of the virus and the exact route of transmission is unknown.

> No, it was not the correct call, because it means that possibility was not investigated when it should have been.

Wuhan is in China, and the government there is relatively unfazed by social media excitement in other countries. It would not have changed a thing.

In early 2020, literally the only thing the story had going for it was that it was more exciting than the alternative, and that it made China look bad. That absolutely is the kind of story you ignore. I'm sure you remember those were heady times, and there was a lot of bullshit to sift through. Some of that bullshit we still have to deal with today.

Based on what we know now, we shouldn't discount the possibility of some involvment of the lab, but that is absolutely not the same thing as believing that it was responsible, or even that the virus was made in some research programme.

I really wish we would see a little bit more of the cool professionalism that you often see in air crash investigations, where everybody understands that assigning blame before the facts are known is quite likely to make you look like a fool later on, and will hurt people for no reason.

> No matter what anyone tells you, there is zero evidence that any part of the virus is engineered (and it isn't even entirely clear what such evidence would look like, in general!).

I'm not a biologist so I don't really know what any of this means, but there seems to be debate around the presence of a "furin site" [0], which apparently could have emerged naturally, but also could have been artificially spliced in the course of gain-of-function research. Is that how GOF research is normally conducted? I don't really know anything here, but at least some people believe there are genetic markers indicating potential lab manipulation, thus adding another datum in the long list of circumstantial evidence.

[0] https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1266805310313967617.html

Yeah, that's why I wrote "no matter what anyone tells you". I am a biologist, and I can say for sure that that's a complete red herring. Of course it could have been added in the lab, but that's literally true for any genetic sequence. It doesn't mean anything. The logic here is 1) new coronavirus is new 2) ??? 3) therefore, it's probably engineered.

As for policy consequences, how about this one:

The United States directly and indirectly funded the Wuhan laboratory, and so bears some responsibility for the virus. It also appears Fauci and others were aware of the deficiencies of the institution. The US should end its support for dangerous research in institutions outside of its purview.

I am not from US.

Back during early pandemy when not only some US politicians blamed China, Chinese politicians blamed US, when people asked me in person about it, I would explain that both are saying the truth.

Obama banned gain of function research in 2015, right after some papers about Coronavirus specifically attracted attention.

The fact that US government continued not just gain of function research, but research into Coronavirus exactly, that was what caused the ban in first place, is something I think the US citizens really need to figure out what to do about it.

Fauci would have been pushed aside, along with EcoHealth Alliance.

The biggest policy consequence is in the headline-- our leaders in health and media would have possessed a lot more credibility than they do now. The consequences of 'polarization' of facts can't be overstated.

Afaik the US did not fund GoF research in the Wuhan Lab which is blamed. How did funding different research make the US responsible?

It's interesting looking at the timeline before Western media picked it up -- in the very early stages, chatter online referencing a leak, (or there was something released deliberately) seemed to be fear of it being a SARS 'biological weapon'. there was overlap with the newly emerging health crisis and the Hong Kong protests, which seems to have fueled that speculation. A good analysis of that time period was done by the Atlantic Council [0]

I have also been archiving different web findings pertaining to all forms of 'leak' speculation in the form of a timeline [1]

[0] https://atlanticcouncil.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/Weapo...

[1] https://news.coffee/wuhan_lab_snippets

I thought this was a fascinating read. I’d love to see more analysis like this of what exactly people said, and how it was quoted and characterized in the media.

Call me cynical...but... What would any government do about it if it was proven to be a lab leak? They could declare it an accident (probably this would be true) and that would be the end of the story.

No country would dare to impose sanctions or engage beyond diplomacy.

I do not think that the Chinese governments reaction or handling of the case is suspect, they likely want to shut down potential fake news. To label it as potential espionage is an ok measure until there was a conclusive investigation. If this happened in other nations, they would just declare it as a matter of national security and incarcerate whistle blowers too. Look no further than Manning and Snowden.

In other words, China will not face any harsh consequences.

If you don't think the CCP handling of the case is suspect, why has Huang Yanling disappeared?

If we knew SARS-CoV-2 was leaked from a lab, that would add a lot of weight to the calls for tighter restrictions on lab security and gain-of-function research, worldwide, that have been going on since before COVID.

Sure, Chinese labs might go on doing whatever they want, but science is an international community. Scientists who break international norms aren't able to collaborate with other scientists or receive cross-border funding.

You miss that china also has internal politics. Not everything is about what the US/western countries think/do/want.

Everyone forgot about Hong Kong: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2019%E2%80%932020_Hong_Kong_pr...

How do you think it would play out if it is found that our government (e.g. NIH/CDC) supplied funding for research that created this virus?

I suspect many countries would take notice.

> funding for research that created this virus?

The very question demonstrates part of the problem here: there are ways that it could have been 'released' by the lab without being 'created' in the lab (or any lab). It's not clear to me that people are aware of this when the lab origin theory is discussed. Please don't prematurely make an assumption about what was going on in the lab.

It's possible that some researcher went into a cave, took some biological samples from bats back to the lab. Thereafter, lack of proper protocol led to an infection that resulted in the pandemic.

Embarrassing for China? yes, and I'd imagine they'd want to cover it up (although such accidents have happened at other worldwide facilities).

The US absolutely knew there were risks here. US diplomats knew that the lab had insufficient safety systems for the research that we already know was being done in Wuhan. Those diplomats explicitly warned the US of the dangers several years ago but the US did nothing. [0]

If anything, the Wuhan lab needed more US funding that was primarily focused on safety.

Edit: If you want to prevent certain types of dangerous research, simply cutting funding is a bad way to do it because it can reduce safety. Instead you need to use other diplomatic or legal tools that won't increase risk.

[0] https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2021/03/08/josh-rogin...

It may change the cost/benefit analysis of viral research. If the risk of a lab escape is presently worse than the risk of a natural virus arising, then there are numerous things governments could do to remedy this. Even if a total research ban isn't warranted, it's probably a good idea to consider banning these labs in cities. The labs could be relocated to remote areas where workers are kept quarantined-by-default.

> What would any ... do about it if it was proven to be a lab leak?

Exactly what was done when Chernobyl was proven to be caused by humans: show the world how reckless and callous the USSR's government really was.

Chernobyl was a huge factor in the eventual collapse of the soviet government. They played a very risky game and it had existential consequences for the power structure that caused it.

There is no way anything can be "proven" in the first place. Does anything think China will will let international investigators waltz into the Wuhan lab and collect samples or something? There will be a ton of meaningless online speculation and people will get bored and move on.

The far right will use this as a reason to curtail research. Maybe just curtail "dangerous" research at first. Then whatever other research they can convince their followers is also dangerous.

Why would you think that's just a "far right" thing?

Actually I don't get what you're insinuating at all. Is anyone opposed to safety protocols?

The US has intelligence that three Wuhan virologists were hospitalized.

China says nobody was sick.

It's quite simple, the US should release the names of those who were sick.

Those people would be silently disappeared the next day.

Seems like a fast way for China to black bag those people if they haven’t already

They never will, because there is no such intelligence, it was reported as a statement from an unnamed intelligence official. It's garbage.

It is really a shame people fall for this garbage after Iraq.

What incentive would the US government have to lie about this though? They were funding research at that lab, I don't understand why they would want people to think lab leak is correct all of a sudden - if that's what you're claiming?

It isn't media fiasco. Media is a business, and they have been selling what has been selling well - i.e. people were buying it very well.

It is fiasco of people believing media without applying basic reality check. In this particular case, the people would easily believe in the coincidence of a very low probability that a virus would jump to humans at the same time and right near, yet without any connection to, the lab where the virus was being bred to do exactly that (the "gain of function research") while dismissing outright the much more probable no-coincidence version of events. Pointing that more than a year ago cost me some karma, and will probably cost me today too :)

After such profound failure of the basic thinking, the people instead of recognizing the failure on their part are still and again blaming media. And the next time the media comes with a well selling, yet failing basic logic/probability/reality/etc check, story the people would again believe in it whole heartedly. Ad infinitum...

Btw, how is that for conspiracy theory - associating the lab leak idea with conspiracy theorism, right wing nut-jobbery and racism was just a successful "damage control" PR operation by China government (and probably by some actors in US as US was partially funding that research in the Wuhan labs after closing such research in US because of the dangers of that research).

In 2017 Marc Lipsitch, a leading epidemiologist at Harvard, warned already for the risk of a pandemic caused by gain of function research: https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-017-08837-7 (end of article)

That same Marc Lipsitch was one of the scientists that signed a letter in May that asked for a deeper and objective investigation about the origins of Covid-19: https://science.sciencemag.org/content/372/6543/694.1

He explained his motivation for the letter in an interview: https://www.wbur.org/commonhealth/2021/05/16/scientists-inve... In this interview he also expressed his regret that the discussion about the COVID origin had become so polarized. The man was right in 2017 but sadly most people didn't hear him ..

And of course it got flagged. What guidelines did it break? Didn't seem like the conversation was getting out of hand.

Tom Cotton has made bombastic statements for years. He makes a another seemingly bombastic statement and rightfully gets ignored, ridiculed, or scorned - and now I'm supposed to be concerned that happened? Tom Cotton is the boy who cried wolf. He has earned the privilege of being ignored. I'm not going to blame the media for ignoring him.

Now a year later and we still haven't determined where this virus came from. People who haven't earned the privilege of being ignored are now starting to present evidence that perhaps the Wuhan Lab was involved in some way. The media is paying attention to those people. They're also paying attention to Beijing being less that forthcoming in helping to get to the bottom of the issue.

I honestly don't see a big smoking gun with the media's coverage of this issue. Certainly nothing warranting the term fiasco.

This article encapsulates the problem with modern media. Yglesias spends a large portion of the article debating the finer points of Tom Cotton's take on the lab leak theory.

As if a junior senator from Arkansas, who's not on any relevant committees (aside from maybe intelligence) is some kinda Rosetta Stone for understanding the media's lack of pushback on the lab leak denials from China and the WHO.

Yglesias labels senator Cotton a "China Hawk," as if that's enough for the story to live and die on his thoughts and quotes. To examine the lab leak hypothesis through the lens of a Republican senator under the pretext of blaming the senator for the media's assessment of a possible lab leak, turns this article into just another liberal think piece masquerading as objective journalism with irrelevant timelines and a puffed up word count.

One of the reporters Matt Yglesias mentions as having done a decent job of reporting on covid-19 in the early days is Julia Belluz at Vox. My startup rates how informative news stories are and we found that Julia was among the top 10 reporters on covid in the early days. https://blog.thefactual.com/credible-journalists-covid-19.

I don't know if all the reporters on our list parroted the same narrative on covid's origins but I suspect they collectively remain a generally reliable source of information on healthcare issues.

Whenever we empower someone/something to moderate anything we should see it as allowing the entity the to misuse whatever power we give them.

Ultimately responsibility is on us for allowing something like this to happen.

Good article but author is wrong about "Cotton attributed this to malice". That's not what his statement said. He simply stated that there is a level 4 super lab in Wuhan which works with similar viruses. That alone is not malice. The virus could have leaked from the lab by accident because of poor practices - that's not malice. Malice would be if it was intentionally leaked. The intention is what scientists and intelligence is supposed to do. One could also say that China banning on national flights and closing off areas while allowing international flights and not providing correct info/warnings to other countries is what real malice is.

> But Cotton did one thing that those other sources didn’t do — he speculated a little. At the end of that clip he says “we still don’t know where coronavirus originated. Could have been a market, a farm, a food processing company. I would note that Wuhan has China’s only biosafety level-four super laboratory that works with the world’s most deadly pathogens to include, yes, coronavirus.”

> Where Cotton differed from the consensus is that he attributed this to malice, which is not what the scientific articles said (but also isn’t a scientific question) and was not the NYT’s preferred interpretation of events.

> “Cotton’s views should be associated with conspiracy theories and misinformation,” even though his core factual claim was not particularly different from what anyone was else was saying.

Does the author not know how conspiracy theories and misinformation campaigns work?

I'm not sure how useful it is doing a hotwash on how we could have been so remiss as to ignore the comments of a public official whose views are often associated with conspiracy theories and misinformation, even if this one time they were not.

Tom Cotton is an idiot and putting his name behind anything is counter productive even if he has a point.

Not just the media, folks, also the rest of our "sense making apparatus".

Wikipedia has been suppressing lab leak discussion, and still to this moment will not allow the old Lab Leak Hypothesis page back. It still redirects to a declared "Misinformation!" page https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=COVID-19_lab_leak...

And guess where else lab leak was suppressed? Here on HN. Yes, dang, you suppressed discussion of a perfectly reasonable hypothesis many times.

So, while I have your attention, the real problem vis a vis Covid19 is not the lab leak. The real problem is "gain of function" research, using gene splicing to make more virulent-to-humans pathogens. And don't read into anything I'm saying, please pay attention to literally what I say here; if you have to reword what I say to cast doubt, you're not playing fair.

This virus was likely man-made because gain of function man made viruses are quite common in research; and this is not a coverup conspiracy caused by the Chinese tendency for face-saving, swept under the carpet, "truths", though there is plenty of that. This scandal was caused by western experts: our best virologists are themselves engaging in gain of function research right here in our very own cities. If you ask them, as the media did, "what likely happened here", their answer is not going to point the finger at themselves, too much funding is at stake.

Good background and in-depth research on the gain of function and lab leak hypotheses was carried out and published on the web over a year ago by Yuri Deigin https://yurideigin.medium.com/lab-made-cov2-genealogy-throug... and it was covered on Bret Weinstein's Dark Horse podcast https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q5SRrsr-Iug

And surprisingly, it is easy for lay people to read/listen and follow because Yuri Deigan is not a virologist, just a really smart educated guy.

and it wasn't just the mainstream media and HN and wikipedia who suppressed the information from you all; sadly it was also because of the politicization, your politicization, of this crisis. If Trump said something, to most of you it just had to be wrong, and for some reason, opening our economy to the Chinese and disliking Russia were sacred cows to the Democrats, and anything Trump did that went the other way just had to be undone.

That is what covered up this most obvious and likely HYPOTHESIS from being discussed: that of a man made, gain of function virus escaping from a lab in Wuhan where the virus broke out.

Was there any Chinese military goal here, as a true conspiracy theory would allege? Sadly, frankly, there doesn't need to be. That's because advanced virology research is of deep interest to every military around the world. See the history of anthrax research. It is publicly acknowledged that it's part and parcel of germ warfare research both for defensive and offensive purposes.

"And guess where else lab leak was suppressed? Here on HN."

And maybe is still getting suppressed? This post was #1 on HN one minute, and then, less than an hour later, it's down on page 3, ranked #88. Does the HN ranking algorithm really bury stuff that quickly?

“This virus was likely man-made because gain of function man made viruses are quite common in research” - this doesn’t seem a convincing argument on its own (ignoring the comments on conspiracy / sense-making / politicisation).

Gain of function research seems valuable precisely in the sense it is identifying the mechanisms that govern infectivity. We wouldn’t have this discussion on furin cleavage sites without it.

The most likely case if we accept the lab leak hypothesis is that there was a base virus that was modified, with a similar virus that had a slightly different spike protein. This then infected staff and from there entered society.

This gains plausibility from the fact that it wouldn’t be readily distinguishable from a natural virus, as it would just be a combination of the two genomes.

However this is exactly why we can’t say for certain either way whether the source is natural or not - they’d be indistinguishable genetically.

It is more likely on the face of it that evolutionary pressure on the virus to spread and the natural process of mutation and selection caused the mutations in question, simply because of the volume of natural mutations versus artificial mutations.

Your Yuri Deigin link was interesting. I was hoping he addressed something I saw elsewhere [0]:

> what about the polybasic cleavage site and the o-linked glycan? We have seen, with other viruses, the ability to develop polybasic cleavage sites when put under just the right conditions for long periods of time. While unlikely, this piece of the virus could plausibly be developed through selection in a lab setting. However, what is near impossible is the development of the o-linked glycan addition motif. This is because the pressure to develop this glycan shield requires avoiding an intact immune system. This type of selection cannot occur using cell culture, and there is no known animal model that would allow for selection of human-like ACE2 binding and avoidance of immune recognition. This strongly implies SARS-CoV-2 could not have been developed in a lab, even by a system of simulated natural selection.

[0] https://leelabvirus.host/covid19/origins-part3

This is a the consequence of having an administration that transparently lied at every turn. Even if they were right, no one would believe them.

Your statement follows a pattern of, ‘the person was doing X therefore the unjustifiable response was justified.’ This fails the commonly adopted Rawlsian theory of justice (Veil of Ignorance), and it is known as victim blaming.

I made no statement about whether anyone's actions were justified, only that they made sense given the state of affairs.

This is pretty anemic self reflection. He never even mentions how the scientific establishment was corralled into compliance with the favored narrative by the Lancet letter organized by Daszak, who was a key player funding gain of function research that involved Wuhan and how that letter was the basis for a year of “fact checking” and cancellation.

He didn’t mention how the Washington Post just changed a 15-month-old headline (of the story he links to) to make themselves look better.

This reporter and his ilk are now busily ignoring or downplaying connections of the US government and Fauci to funding of gain of of function research in which the Wuhan lab was involved. (Cuz Rand Paul already made up his mind or something.)

They won’t really learn anything from this sorry episode.

By March, it didn't matter whether the virus had come from a lab or a spillover event, because a bigger, more pressing issue had emerged: what to do now that the virus was outside China. Now that that threat is starting to abate, it seems discussion has picked up where it left off.

The media really aren't the story here. their credibility couldn't be any lower. what is interesting is how the scientists stayed quiet, how big tech continues to use fact checkers to censor, and how the Chinese communist party and their allies were able to call discussion of lab leak theory causing hate but the notion of Chinese eating bat soup would not.

What all those Wuhan lab story miss is a good explanation as to why the oldest cases are outside Wuhan.

Thank you. Had to scroll to the next page to find this comment. The lab leak theory never made any sense, because it does not fit the timeline of the viral spread. Nor does it explain why some countries already had T-cell immunity to the virus.

well, it could make sense, but it's not the simplest scenario because the first cases were outside. It would be more reasonable if the earliest cases were actually close to it. And as far as I know there is no suspicion that it comes from another lab.

Your conclusion is correct, if the premise is true. Do you have a source for this? (Asking sincerely, not cynically.)

"Suppose the media had been more open to Cotton’s point"

I sincerely have trouble imagining such discourse taking place. Isn't that sad?

Seriously, which mainstream media personality would actually entertain an idea from Tom Cotton long enough to seriously consider whether it's true or not?

"The boy who cried wolf", comes to mind.

If you spout a bunch of nonsense about Climate Change being a hoax, don't be too surprised when a lot of people start ignoring or even deriding the things you say. Even if the wolf does eventually show up.

So this is the fault of the people who were probably right. And it is not the fault of the people who told them to be quiet and that they believed in conspiracy theories.

This is the opposite lesson you should be taking away from this.

The 'media' has a bias towards team-alignment. This makes sense. The Washington Post is more like Arsenal Fan TV than it is like The Lancet. You don't go there for truth. You go there to either yell at your team or support your team, but ultimately you go there to be with your team.

This isn't because they're dumb or anything. It's just a natural result of what we, as consumers, want.

It happened with masks, it happened with this nonsense, it will happen again.

I thought much of how it went was driven by a seeming confusion between "escaping from a lab" meaning "created or otherwise altered in a lab."

Actually I believe it would be better if we never find the true origin of COVID-19.

It has drawn attention to:

- Improving handling of live animals

- Improving lab procedures for biological materials

If we would know the true origin, less attention would be given to other scenario's that are also quite possible for other diseases.

Also, the current attacks on China will only cause it to be even more suspicious about foreign contacts, and that could hurt international cooperation in future pandemics.

Just a reminder that a lab leak of SARS had already happened in Beijing in early 2000s, and for which Chinese CDC officials were publicly punished.

It was even reported in CCP owned China Daily: https://www.chinadaily.com.cn/english/doc/2004-07/02/content...

Surprised to see people really tackling this and reflecting.

including: from the Hill / Rising with Krystal and Saagar

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DeuwqHDIRSQ

Media’s Lab-Leak Failure Is [like ramifications from] Next Iraq WMD

[brackets words added by me, not in original title, also uncapped some words]

To me what gives me credence to the "lab leak theory" more than anything, was China's behavior during and initially after the outbreak. Where they thwarted any investigations from WHO or anyone else and arrested journalists even attempting to cover it. Now we have additional information of lab workers being sick back in November...I genuinely wonder why people immediately jumped in to defend China's actions through the entire thing. I feel like it was in part because of money interests and also because it was something Trump touted as true.

The biggest sign for me is how the Chinese government threatened to charge medical workers with espionage if they speak about what happened during the early stages of the outbreak. https://english.kyodonews.net/news/2020/11/9833532bb925-chin...

Consider the following: How can a medical worker speaking about their own experience working at a hospital in any way constitute espionage?

If found guilty of espionage, by law they can be executed. Anyone who speaks up can be killed.

The problem with this thinking is assuming the government of China actually knows the truth and is acting to protect itself from a dangerous reveal. They might not have known then (or now!) and are simply acting based on some probability it could be true, default secrecy, and organizational fear.

China forbade sharing covid-19's genome. When a Chinese scientist published it his lab was shut down the next day.

>The Chinese government had prohibited labs from publishing information about the new coronavirus, though Zhang later said he did not know about the prohibition. The next day, the Shanghai Health Commission ordered Zhang's laboratory to close temporarily for "rectification". While some media reports argued that the closure was retaliation for Zhang's decision to publish the genome, Zhang disputed this, saying that officials were right to have the lab improve its biosafety protocols.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zhang_Yongzhen

Interesting how media coverage completely changed. Under the previous administration it was considered racist to even mention the theory and it's proponents were considered racists or conspiracy theorists.

Why such a sudden change? China certainly didn't change its position on the issue...

> To me what gives me credence to the "lab leak theory" more than anything, was China's behavior during and initially after the outbreak [...]

That all sounds to me just like a massive authoritarian government bureaucracy dealing with a quick moving disaster on their soil where the beaurocrats didn't know what was happening, because the scientists couldn't tell them, so they leaned in on trying to control everyone.

The argument rephrased reads to me like "The reason why I believe in the lab leak theory is that an authoritarian country behaved like an authoritarian country, when I would have expected them to behave like my western democracy".

I think they defend China because it makes them feel as if China needs their defense, even though it is far more powerful than they are prepared to admit.

It is generally very hard to read too much into what the Chinese govt does because govt behaviour is typically a function of domestic situation, and their domestic situation is very different to ours. The Chinese govt tends to over-react, there is a weird tug of war between local and national politicians, authority in Chinese politics (to me) seems very situational and freewheeling in a way that US politics isn't (an odd point given Chinese criticism of democracy)...it is tricky to read anything into their behaviour.

As an example, it is possible that this was a lab leak but that this fact was suppressed by the local govt, and no-one in the central govt is any the wiser.

Defending China was because Trump was anti-China. I don't think money was anything to do with it, there is always going to be a section of the media (on both sides) that defines their view as the opposite of what "the other side" believes. There is nothing complicated about this, it is just a terrible idea to think this way and it will almost always backfire. Trump, in particular, brought out this characteristic to an unprecedented level...if Trump had said that grass was green, some sections of the media would have had pundits on an hour later expressing how dangerous that sentiment was and that, whilst grass appears green to the laymen, it is actually a very, very, very subtle shade of brown (even Obama didn't trigger this kind of neuralgia on the right).

I think given the demagogue POTUS and the mob of crazy followers, it was in the public interest to avoid agitating the mob. Even Facebook had the sense to realize that.

As it stands, asian people are getting targeted for attacks in the street by deranged individuals.

> I feel like it was in part because of money interests and also because it was something Trump touted as true.

I agree on both counts. With respect to the latter, I yearn for a time when we can dissect the media's coverage of Trump somewhat dispassionately without being branded a Trump Supporter (as though there is some kind of firm dichotomy in which we must be one of Team Trump or Team Media).

CCP's complete lock down of internal flights while leaving international outgoing flights wide open right at the start out this is more damming than the lab leak hypothesis.

I think it was because the Trump admin had a history of China bashing and many of us just thought this was more of the same.

I think, like me, many dismissed the lab-leak theory because it sounded like yet-another attempt to push the blame for all the unnecessary death from Trump to China, as well as the cavalcade of doctors stating that the DNA of the virus was clearly not artificially constructed.

I'm just going to say it - no one in their right mind would want Donald Trump leading a military war against our strongest frenemy in the world.

You don't have to hate Trump to admit that he lacks complex strategy and communication skills, as well as a very week, if not incompetent, cabinet.

Politically speaking, being in a "justified war" would have done nothing but hurt the democrats chances. It's hard to unseat a president at 4 years already, but with an ongoing war it's even harder.

Anarchists are right. F#ck these governments and corporations destroying the earth and trying to shape reality.

This article explains in very detailed, yet understandable way why the lab leak is a serious hypothesis:

https://nicholaswade.medium.com/origin-of-covid-following-th...

George Hotz attempted to reverse engineer the virus. His attempts at doing so can be watched here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=StGm-m1EUgk

With about as much success my sock had reverse engineering George Hotz's code.

I think there's a difference between making an extreme claim in the early days of this thing without giving evidence to back it up, compared to now where there's been a year's worth of putting the pieces together. And even now we don't know-- it's just better informed speculation (although the intelligence community may have more to go on that we don't know about.)

The media isn't great about reporting science, but I don't fault them for being critical of an unsupported claim made at a time when it was in the political interests of a person's party to cast blame in China's direction.

Calling that a fiasco is itself ignoring the contexts involved as reporting changed. Making an unsupported accusation that turns out to be correct doesn't mean it was right to make the accusation at that time.

> Making an unsupported accusation that turns out to be correct doesn't mean it was right to make the accusation at that time

I agree with this and thanks for expressing what I was thinking, but didn't really know how to say it

Hopefully people will start to realize that questioning norms and diversity of thought should be accepted on social media. Silencing and suppression of questions and thought by media is rampant and occurs here on Hacker News as well.

The population as a whole (especially under the age of 30) feels like a bunch of sheep to me these days. They can't think freely, question things, or ask hard questions. They all just want to fit in. Ideology that doesn't align with bit tech and social media agendas is quickly dismissed as right-wing idiocracy.

No sure why it is a big deal? Some people (like Cotton) said that the virus escaped a Chinese lab, but had not hard proofs. Lots of scientists said there are no hard proofs. Then we moved on... until we get more proofs.

Anybody can claim anything including truth, but until it is proven to be true, it would be discredited. In this case, finding the truth with hard proofs is not trivial.

If we find out tomorrow that it was indeed a virus escaped from a Chinese lab, then so be it. I expect from media to find the truth among the sea of noise and misinformation. Sometimes it takes time.

Even if the US gov knew about the source of the virus, back in Feb. 2020, I can understand that they decided to sit on it. Fighting the pandemic was the priority, before pointing fingers.

It would be interesting to see, if the virus was indeed escaped from a Chinese lab, what would be the consequences ? Will all countries would come to some kind of agreement to stop playing with bioweapons ? Or they would double down on bioweapons (e.g. with a vaccine before being released) ? Or do like before, and hoping for the best ?... we gonna wipe us out of this planet !

what happened to those scientists/lab reports saying their were fatalities in California as early as August/September 2019?

The youtube accounts that mirrored it were all deleted and I've not seen a word on it since.

There has been an attempt by some researchers to determine when the first cases of covid were detected in wastewater samples. There are three known studies so far.

December 2019 in Italy: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7428442/

November 2019 in Brazil: https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.06.26.20140731v...

March 2019 in Spain: https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.06.13.20129627v...

So Tom Cotton is owed an apology, and the American people can stand to remember they were badly misled by 'scientists' and the media just before a presidential election.

It's not like people are allowing themselves to be led around and told what to think or something.

"If the question is “are both hypotheses possible?” the answer is yes. Both are possible. If the question is “are they equally likely?” the answer is absolutely not. One hypothesis requires a colossal cover-up and the silent, unswerving, leak-proof compliance of a vast network of scientists, civilians, and government officials for over a year. The other requires only for biology to behave as it always has, for a family of viruses that have done this before to do it again. The zoonotic spillover hypothesis is simple and explains everything. It’s scientific malpractice to pretend that one idea is equally as meritorious as the other. The lab-leak hypothesis is a scientific deus ex machina, a narrative shortcut that points a finger at a specific set of bad actors. I would be embarrassed to stand up in front of a room of scientists, lay out both hypotheses, and then pretend that one isn’t clearly, obviously better than the other"

https://massivesci.com/articles/sars-cov-coronavirus-covid19...

The cover up didn't need to be colossal, just for everyone to point to occams razor and call anyone with a hint of curiosity a racist.

The fact that the origin of the outbreak appears to be in the same vicinity as a lab that experiments on similar viruses alone is sufficient reason to want a thorough investigation.

Otherwise, the odds that nature produced such a virus, in such a location, make for a crazy coincidence, given that we havent been facing this problem every year for decades.

If the CCP didn't have such a startling surveillance system and tight grip over any international narrative, I'd be inclined to agree with you.

But they have done themselves no favors in their handling of the situation.

I'm not sure the coverup would require a vast network of people. Maybe 1-2 dozen in a lab, max, (depending on who knew which experiments were being done) and a bunch of CCP members who I would not be surprised are tight lipped.

The counter questions are equally as troubling.

- Why haven't we found the host species? Typically it takes a few months, but we're going on 1.5 years. You'd think the CCP would have it very high on their priority list to find.

- How did this virus mutate a series of genetic sequences, none of which are found in other corona viruses? The series of mutations in SARS-COV2 seems very unlikely to have been a natural fluke.

There's a lot of questions here on both sides.

For me, I'd still put it at 50-50. I will not be surprised if a smoking gun is found one way or the other.

Why does it require a cover-up so vast? All you need to keep the secret is blocking access from international investigators and the silence of the very few people originally involved. There's tons of precedent of harsh and inhumane penalties for saying things the government doesn't want you to from within China. And international investigation is quite simple to decline, you just say no. I don't think it's as complicated as you're trying to make it sound.

People keep conflating 'lab leak' with 'made in a lab'.

Think about this: If it was a natural virus that escaped from a lab, China wouldn't necessarily even know about the escape for sure. We could imagine a scenario where maybe China started to suspect that might be what happened around Jan/Feb 2020. So then you don't need a collosal cover up, because hardly anyone knows for sure anyway - you just need to obstruct anyone asking questions that lead in that direction, and obfuscate any clues (publications from the lab saying what they were working on, reports of staff illness etc)

> silent, unswerving, leak-proof compliance of a vast network of scientists, civilians, and government officials for over a year

I was watching translated videos early last year made by chinese scientists trying to get the word out, at the risk of their lives. Compliance is simple: you talk, you "disappear".

The Great Firewall blocks in both directions, and is very good. Additionally, the West had already decided that it was politically expedient to ignore lab leak possibility. That meant the primary avenue for such leaks were more underground sources, like 4chan.

Both this and the originally linked article are long on politics and conspiracies and short on science, which is why the responses end up being political. The interesting questions here are not about CCP secrecy but about mutation rates in different environments and how effectively scientists can engineer mutations versus evolving them. It would be much more convincing evidence of lab leaks if examples of effective gain of function mutations being injected by scientists (or some kind of accelerated evolution by manipulating lab conditions) could be discussed and explained.

There won’t be a scientific conclusion based on an analysis of what media leaked what when.

The zoonotic spillover doesn't seem to address geography. Why would the virus first appear in a city near a virology institute instead of out in the country near bat habitats? The speculation from scientists like Dr. Daszak is that someone ate an infected live bat from "southern China."

I've seen the studies about air flows in restaurants and buffets and none seem to indicate that Covid is food borne. So we have someone in the wet market about to bite into some delicious live bat and they give it a big sniff right as the bat expels some of its last little virus contaminated breaths. "Squee, squee" says the bat. "Hmm-mm finger licking good" says the world's unluckiest connoisseur of things that flutter in the night.

Alternatively, someone was careless in a lab studying the same family of bats and viruses. In the sense that one need not attribute to malice that which is explained by incompetence, the leaked virus need not have been some "biowarfare" effort, maybe just something a bit entrepreneurial or a side experiment to see if something could work.

https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/who-report-says-covid-orig...

Rootclaim has some fairly compelling analysis which suggests the lab leak scenario is more likely: https://www.rootclaim.com/analysis/What-is-the-source-of-COV...

> vast network of scientists, civilians, and government officials

Few corrections:

* CCP government officials, who have every single incentive to participate in cover-up

* I am not sure how much cover-ups needed by any civillian, let alone vast network of civillians. An average civillian is probably not aware of lab leak to begin with, unless they were informed by media.

* again, not vast network of scientists is needed for cover-up. Mostly researchers and officials in Wuhan Lab. Like CCP officials, who have every single incentive to participate in cover-up

The reality of this quote doesn’t justify censorship

So I can wave the red, white, and blue all day with my TXSSAR membership, 2 flag triangles, and good life.. but still there are deeper, fundamental, metastasized cancerous problems with the shining city on the hill that have tarnished it.

Greed. Corruption. Apathy. Ignorance. Narcissistic self-absorption (hyperindividualism). Unfocused leadership.

Under such conditions of weak debate ethics and sensible balance, democracy gives oxygen to the crazies and drives policy and attention to satisfy the conspiracy theorists who demand a particular investigational outcome. It's not that free speech needs to go away, but that the leadership shouldn't kowtow to idiocy or even consider what's popular if it's existentially-vital. This can only be accomplished with ethical leadership, which I don't see happening anytime soon since celebrity straw puppets are typically installed to continue serving the interests of the 1%.

If it were possible, leadership means putting on the Big Boy™ pants and not bending and shifting focus on the whims of idiots. There are no political figures anywhere that I've seen who aren't duplicitous, have a backbone, and are empathetic and sane individuals.

Perhaps political parties and elections should be disbanded and revert to "jury duty" public administration for a fixed term (1 year) from a pool of random, qualified, competent professionals.

Remember what a democratic idiocracy did to Socrates. "Democracy" is another word for "mob rule." Combine mob rule with vulture capitalism selling off public infrastructure to corporations and corruption, then you have basically the recipe for a third-world country fighting over the last scraps of what was once a nearly shiny city on a hill (minus the genocides, training of death squads, banana wars, and Monroe doctrine).

The only way for the human species to survive is to crawl-out from under greed, dogma, conflict, laziness, material comfort, and ignorance and do many thing to defeat the threats to our very survival.

Wasn’t this all just to be contrarian to Trump? Trump says lab leak? Can’t be lab leak! Trump says travel ban? Travel bans are racist!

Now that Trumps out the lab leak is something to look into and everyone has done some level of travel ban without being labeled racist.

My guess is people who downvote without a comment still really hate trump.

This is a post mortem for a corpse that was already dead.

Trump derangement syndrome guaranteed this outcome.

Reap what you sow. American mainstream media is pure propaganda, full stop. The national voice is the pr teams of our most valuable corporations. The patient is dead.

When was the last time you thought about what Julian Assange is going through?

Another political article about how it's not possible that the Chinese were studying the virus and some underpaid lab tech screwed and and exposed himself and then did what humans always do, the tech tried to cover up the mistake.

Nobody has still explained how the Chinese knew they had a problem in early December when they only had a handful of cases, like less than 100 cases. This is the question that needs to be answered. Until this question is answered satisfactorily the lab leak is the most reasonable explanation.

The normal ways you detect a new virus is because:

a) you have novel symptoms, COVID presents as the flu and early on tests didn't exist. b) you have a statistically significant number of cases, early on the number of cases didn't exceed the seasonal variability of the flu. c) you have a statically significant number of deaths, early on the number of death's didn't exceed the seasonal variability of the flu.

When the Chinese knew they had a problem, there was NOTHING that would indicate anything out of the ordinary was taking place, so then how did the Chinese know they had a problem?

If the virus really jumped species in the wet market, the Chinese wouldn't have known they had a problem until either the cases or the death totals started to exceed the normal variability of the flu. If that had happened we wouldn't have know about COVID until Late Jan or early Feb, and then it would have been really, really ugly. But that's not what happened, the Chinese knew about it in early December. The only way they could have known is if they had prior knowledge.

They were no wild animals sold at the seafood market, only seafood product. Picture of people eating bat soup were taken in Palau island. Wild animal market pictures were taken in Guilin, Gongguan or even Tomohon market in Indonesia. Youtube, Twitter and Facebook were spammed with fake videos claiming to be from Wuhan wet market although they were from these other locations. An interview in a Japanese documentary in Wuhan: https://youtu.be/N4ABOJ1y5iM?t=429

Nobody seems to remember that by the end of March 2020, there was a report about Guilin and Gongguan wild animal markets already reopening: https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-8163761/Chinese-mar...

COVID was detected as SARS when Wuhan doctors started harboring suspicions and requested analysis of some patient samples. So it was immediately known that a SARS outbreak or something very much like it was in progress.

"Another political article about how it's not possible that the Chinese were studying the virus and some underpaid lab tech screwed and and exposed himself and then did what humans always do, the tech tried to cover up the mistake."

no, you're wrong. You need to focus attention not on the lab-leak, which could be small mistake by an underling, but instead on the gain-of-function research that is the goal of labs like Wuhan and likely created this virus with approval of the highest levels of the lab.

Isn’t the article about misreporting by multiple organisations? Rather than about the source of COVID-19?

i think the story is that doctors noticed cases of unusual pneumonia and investigated further. not impossible, especially in a country with SARS experience

"The past never had been altered. Oceania was at war with Eastasia. Oceania had always been at war with Eastasia."

Ill bet most of the country still thinks the Hunter Biden laptop story is “baseless Russian conspiracy”.

Didn't recognize the author until near the end:

> My position on China is we need “One Billion Americans” in order to stay number one forever, and I’m not going to change that view.

Current Affairs has an interesting article on the author's peculiar form of liberal nationalism[0].

[0]: https://www.currentaffairs.org/2020/11/why-nationalism-is-a-...

This article correctly notices at the very start that asking this question is of no value in resolving the current situation. Then the author seems to think they've uncovered a massive secret instead of continuing the thought.

Who wants this question in the public's mind? What are their goals in constantly pushing it, even though it does nothing to improve people's lives? What are the actual effects of pushing this question as if it was important?

https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2021/04/21/one-third-o...

I think it's better to not contribute to an environment of hatred towards large groups of people. Is the question potentially interesting? Sure, I suppose. But there's a huge difference between idly thinking about something and telling everybody else that they should as well. The latter has consequences, and you can't just ignore them.

So we should hide information because it might cause people to have a negative view towards the country of China? How about this - let all information, whether it goes with your far left anti-racist view or not, be put freely out to the public and let the public decide how they want to react. Of course some people will take it to the extreme, but that doesn’t mean we aren’t entitled to this info. Anyone who lost a loved one, had their livelihoods reduced, or fell ill absolutely deserve to know what was done and what steps we are going to take to never allow it to happen again.

I never need censorship of any information by anyone, no matter how noble or misguided their deed.

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